In the food technology field, the typical food consumer or preparer is often an amateur that lacks specialized knowledge in food science, recipe creation, and related aspects of food technology. Thus recipes, including a set of ingredients and guidelines for food preparation, are created by more experienced food preparers for dissemination to amateur food preparers and/or the public at large. However, availability of ingredients or lack thereof, ingredient cost, and/or user-specific food preferences can cause difficulty in following such recipes, given the lack of specialized knowledge on the substitutability of similar ingredients and the associated changes in the preparation guidelines on the part of the amateur food preparer or other member of the food-preparing public. Conventional approaches include simple heuristics that can be learned, but the considerations are often too complex and thus such heuristics regularly fail. Amateur food preparers can attempt to seek out detailed substitution information, but the information is often inconsistent across available sources (e.g., the Internet) and performing such a search requires some preexisting knowledge concerning what to seek out.
Thus, there is a need in the food technology field for methods and systems for improving food-related personalization to user needs. This invention provides such new and useful methods and systems.